Skip to main content

Beyond Conspiracy

March 2023
1min read

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

by Gerald Posner, Random House, 607 pages

The conspiracy-book industry seized on last fall’s thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy tragedy for its latest barrage. Among all the new volumes, Gerald Posner’s calm and definitive study, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK , arrives at the most truly radical conclusion: “One man, acting alone, killed the President.” He asserts that the Warren Commission’s 1964 report was flawed but correct after all.

The more you know about Oswald, Posner shows, the more inescapable it seems that he was the unassisted killer. As he convincingly demonstrates, the adult Oswald simply wasn’t stable enough to have played a major role in an elaborate farreaching conspiracy that stayed secret. Posner also sets straight the long-debated facts of the Dallas shooting and analyzes the Warren Commission’s investigation. There is a probing chapter on Jack Ruby, an excellent appendix on ballistics, and a fascinating look at the Zapruder film, using computer enhancement to trace the trajectories backward from the bullet wounds. This book’s flimsy predecessors are no match for it.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February/March 1994"

Authored by: The Editors

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

Authored by: The Editors

Washington

Authored by: The Editors

Phil Stern’s Hollywood: Photographs 1940–1979

Authored by: The Editors

W. E. B. Du Bois Biography of a Race, 1868–1919

Authored by: The Editors

722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York

Authored by: The Editors

The Duke Ellington Reader

Authored by: The Editors

The Debate on the Constitution

Authored by: The Editors

Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community

Authored by: The Editors

Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine

Authored by: The Editors

The Donner Party

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.